U.S. Regulator Defends Fukushima Daiichi Policy

Gregory Jaczko, the top U.S. nuclear regulator, caused a lot of grief for the Japanese government by calling for an 80-kilometer emergency evacuation zone shortly after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident, but now he’s offering a qualified defense of Japan’s longer-term evacuation policy.

Reuters

Gregory Jaczko spoke in the White House in Washington, DC, on March 14.

At a Washington forum Monday night, Mr. Jaczko, chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said he is sympathetic to the Japanese government’s standard of 20 millisieverts of annual exposure for determining which areas need to be evacuated indefinitely. Some critics say that’s too high and could expose children in particular to higher cancer risk.

“You’re dealing with a statistical risk,” Mr. Jaczko said, responding to a Japanese reporter’s question. “We don’t really have definitive standards for what is an acceptable level.” He noted that a CT scan or two could expose someone to the same level of radiation.

Although the Japanese government has said it hopes those in evacuated areas can go home someday, Mr. Jaczko suggested the evacuations might be permanent—which, he said, was another reason to think carefully before ordering them.

“For the government, it’s a very difficult decision to say, ‘You can never go back to your home,’ ” Mr. Jaczko said during the event, sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “I don’t think any of these decisions would be easy.”

On March 16, five days after the earthquake and tsunami that triggered the nuclear accident, Mr. Jaczko called for the 80-kilometer, or 50-mile, evacuation zone for Americans, which conflicted with the 20-kilometer zone Japan had created at the time.

He defended that decision again on Monday, saying it was done to protect American citizens, while acknowledging that one of his fears at the time—damage to fuel rods in the spent-fuel pool of Reactor No. 4—turned out to be unfounded.

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